Netflix Orders ‘Gay James Bond’ Series For Adults

Columbia

Streaming giant Netflix has given the green light to an LGBTQ animated series based on spy movies like James Bond.

The show, titled Q-Force, has been created by Will & Grace star Sean Hayes, with Parks and Recreation‘s Mike Schur and Brooklyn Nine-Nine writer Gabe Liedman, with production company Hazy Mills’ Todd Milliner executive producing.

It is the latest in Netflix’ move to bring more LGBTQ characters to the world of animated television, such as their popular show Super Drags, about a team of drag queen superheroes.

Netflix

Q-Force is said to tell the story of ‘a handsome secret agent and his team of fellow LGBTQ super spies’ who are underestimated by their colleagues, having to prove themselves as they embark on professional – and personal – adventures.

Hayes and Milliner have reportedly been working on a series about a gay spy for a long time, according to Deadline.

Milliner said:

A spy TV series is so tough, because they’re so expensive. We were thinking how do we get to do gay spy and every week, and the only way to do that is animated, because we can do all of the fun parts of a James Bond film. We can travel, we can have big chase sequences; animation is allowing us that freedom.

Hayes said:

Also, I don’t know that the studios would greenlight a feature with a leading character that’s gay in that genre. Hopefully they will, but that doesn’t seem like right now.

Milliner added:

It does seem like it’s one of the last bastions of masculinity that seems like we can’t break the rule of who gets to play that part.

Milliner also explained how they came to work with Mike Schur, one of the writers and creators behind Brooklyn Nine-Nine, The Good Place and Parks and Recreation.

He said:

I’ve been friends with Mike for a long, long, long time, and I was literally driving my car to work, and he was walking. I pulled over and I rolled down my window and I said, ‘Hey Mike, would you want to work on something together?’ He’s like, ‘What is it?’ And I said ‘Gay James Bond’, and he said, ‘Yeah, I would do that’. So that’s how it all kind of started.

Q-Force has, so far, been offered a ten-episode series by Netflix.

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Charlie Cocksedge

Charlie Cocksedge is a journalist and sub-editor at UNILAD. He graduated from the University of Manchester with an MA in Creative Writing, where he learnt how to write in the third person, before getting his NCTJ. His work has also appeared in such places as The Guardian, PN Review and the bin.